


By the Horns

by Fly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Horns, Karkatisms, Makeover, Other, Schoolfeeding, Swearing, Weird alien friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-08
Updated: 2012-11-08
Packaged: 2017-11-18 05:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/557437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fly/pseuds/Fly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat gets Terezi to sharpen his horns.</p><p>Written for the Homestuck Kink Meme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Horns

Thinking back to all his miserable hours of schoolfeeding in front of the computer, Karkat could almost remember the periods of Trauma Cautellery thinkfodder. He'd paid very little attention to them at the time, knowing that if he got damaged enough to bleed he was as good as culled, and so factoids about cleaning stab wounds and removing swords from your visage platter seemed like they'd be pretty inconsequential for someone sitting in a candy-red paddling pool of their own blood, on show for everyone to come and see. 

One thing that he did remember was the thinkfodder regarding how to treat a broken horn, because the thinkfodder had been a lot like Troll Anatomy, and amongst the thirty thousand other trolls subscribed to his schoolfeeding programmette, none of them could ever hope to outdo him at Troll Anatomy. When it came to knowing sponge clots from throb stalks, Karkat was simply the best there was.

"Take a look at this cross-section of this wiggler skull," the feedmatron had said, and then cross-sected the skull with a medical claymore in the kind of horrifying burgundy tsunami that Karkat swore he had to watch on this fodderstream every other damn day. Once most of the blood had drained down through the central abyss grill, and Karkat had uncovered his eyes feeling at least grateful the wiggler had stopped screaming, the feedmatron had picked a chunk out of the carnage and held it to the see-engine.

"Note the way the horn is formed," she had said. Karkat had squinted at it on his screen. Sliced, it was mostly a milky yellow, darkening to orange at the edges, and with a fine pattern of ridges and ripples that shimmered as she tilted it. Nestled in the root, against the porous cranial plate, was a stringy burgundy and hot orange mass that wiggled upwards in the direction of the horn's tip. Karkat felt a few Troll Anatomy assumptions click together happily in his think pan - the fleshy part had to be the part which registered the horrible zaptwinge you feel when you grab the root of your horn with cold hands.

At this point, some anonymous sniggering cerulean looking for a trollable ruptuary and using the obviously fake student ID #88888888 passed him a note that commented on the organ's similarity to how she imagined his weirdo ablood bone bulge to look. Karkat had got distracted ordering her to execute a convoluted and almost impossible form of autoerotic torture, and was just about to start attaching clip art when the screaming on the audio alerted him to the fact that the feedmatron had bought out a new victim.

"As you can see, this seven-sweep-old has been injured in a bout of friendly adolescent rutting," she explained, and the victim nodded sheepishly, staring at the camera with glassy olive eyes. She had one ridiculously skinny horn with a precariously large outgrowth at the end, and one ridiculously skinny mangled stump. STUDENT #88888888 passed a badly-typed note to Karkat commenting that her symbol, a distended loopy shape, looked like his stupid nook probably did. It reminded Karkat more of the head of that mythological time demon-prophet Gamzee raved to him about once - the one called Durden, or Button, or something.

"Fortunately, as the chitinating feelsponge core has not been damaged, it will grow back and she is not in pain, but if the horn splits further along the weak points - see here, where it is beginning to peel? - it can be excruciating, not to mention leave you open to disease. In order to prevent this, it is important to see a professional horn-trimmer who can clean up the ends for you without accidentally digging through to the core, and even skillfully shape your remaining horn into one of a variety of trendy styles."

At this point, Sollux, who Karkat was mildly surprised to discover was bothering with schoolfeeding today, passed him a note that made him roll his ganderbulbs so hard that he was fairly sure his sense stalks twisted around the middle of them like candy-red yo-yo strings:

STUDENT #01011010: they want u2 two go and pay a fat multiicaegar2tack 2o a home2tuck adult can 2tand behiind u2 wiith a 2harp object next two our head2? no chance. iid put all my money on iit beiing a culliing trap. a miind honey pot for 2tylii2h and 2tupiid bee2. off two learn how two do iit my2elf iin2tead 2iince ii have 2x more horn2 to lo2e than mo2t guy2. you 2hould two kk.

You don't even have much money to put on it, thought Karkat, cantankerously - you spend all of your meager mustardblood allowance on archaeology expeditions and marginally faster beequeens with different apps installed or whatever it is the hell you do to get through your torturous-times-two existences as the shallow bifurcated double-douchebag that you are.

Of course, Karkat would never go to any other troll if he was injured even bloodlessly just in case it turned out that in order to check the depth of his injury they would have to open him up. And even if they were going to acquiesce to the Empress's need for orderly records, and not just murder him there and then, they would spread the message about faster than he could escape. Rumours would churn into rancid story butter in the social media milkvessel. Gossip would fly, sailing into the sun in the manner of some cool guy with wings leaving a fucknig piece of gargbage. By the time he could get his blunt-filed grill off-continent, great legendary troubadours from across the cascading universes would have heard of his exploits, and badinage and balladeer about how he was strawberry-filled, forever. 

But all that said, the stupidity of Sollux's conspiracy theories was massively emetic as a rule, and he wasn't going to pay attention to them when the chances of him breaking a horn were essentially nil. The one upshot of having stupid-looking nubs was that they were unusually structurally solid, and between that and the high-chitin diet he got from all the delicious seabugs his crab bought home, they were pretty much like wearing a pair of cement fists on his head. In fact, if he crashed headfirst into something, it would be more likely his skull would break around the horn instead of the other way around. There were evilutionary psychiaterrorists all around the universe who claimed that was why big horns are supposed to be sexy - more shock absorption. It was a stupid theory, not least because it was used to market bullshit horn-extending supplements like that Viagrub poison that caused that whole colony planet to die.

STUDENT #01011010: or maybe ii 2hould 2end away for 2ome viiagrub from a 2pam emaiil 2o you can actually have horn2 two break. ehehehehehe.

Well, that settled it.

Ignoring the droning voice of the feedmatron over his headphones, Karkat tabbed through the obscenity-filled technicolour fenestrations of the note-passing software - #88888888 had apparently cut and pasted Karkat's response publicly on a memo somewhere and now he had three hundred assholes trolling for a piece of the outrage pie - and pulled up a blank Spitball. Then, with the air of a virturipperoso striking the first key of his sonata, he hit Caps Lock.

STUDENT #01506969: FIRST OF ALL, SOLLUX, AS MY BEST FRIEND, I NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT GO FUCK YOURSELF, YOU CONVOLUTED TWIN-NOZZLED NOOK-CLEANSING BULB SYRINGE, AND SO ON. SECOND OF ALL, FUCK YOU AND YOUR SMUG AIR OF RESPONSIBILITY AND YOUR MEANINGLESS CONSPIRACY NAVEL-GAZING AND THE 2HIITTY WAY YOU TYPE; BASICALLY, FUCK ALL THOSE ASPECTS OF YOU THAT COMBINE TO FORM A TOUGH MUSTARD SANDPAPER THAT I THEN HAVE TO RUB MY EYEBALLS ALONG.

I MIGHT HAVE CARED AT FIRST, BUT SINCE YOU WENT ON TO PROVE THAT YOU ARE A COMPLETE WASTE OF FLESHJACKET I HAVE DECIDED I WILL NEVER, EVER DO WHAT YOU SUGGESTED. WRITING MY SYMBOL ACROSS MY HEART LIKE IT WAS A HALLOWED SIGIL, I SWEAR THAT IF THE OPPORTUNITY EVER APPEARS TO TEACH ME HOW TO TRIM MY HORNS, YOU CAN CONSIDER ME STROLLING STRAIGHT ON PAST, WHISTLING, WHILE IT SOBS AND ATTEMPTS TO HANG ITSELF FOR ATTENTION. OK, I'M DOING IT TO SPITE YOU, BUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT? SPITE IS GOOD, IT'S LIKE HATE WITH SOMETHING TO PROVE.

He hit the Spit button and sunk to the bottom of his chair, arms folded and sullen.

Only after two minutes' thought did he consider that the last couple of sentences of the Spitball may be interpretable in a solicitous way, and the thought percolated through the filter paper of self-analysis into a rich, bitter coffee of pre-adolescent concupiscent confusion. He wasn't even five sweeps yet - the only crush he knew he had for real was a stupid unrequited pale one, and even then that was all Gamzee's fault for leading him on with all that calming-supportive-highblood-friend shit - and he wasn't quite sure whether or not he felt anything quite so visceral towards Sollux, because he had no emotional frame of reference to go on. He knew he wanted to be able to give all his hate to someone special, a destined loathing written with stars studded in alien skies, but at the same time, a little voice in his head reminded him that Sollux was probably going to be his best shot at developing a healthy kismesis, and if he was going to be his destined perfect hate in future then he'd better start coming up with zany romcom schemes now, before it was too late.

Exactly at the moment he realised his whole reverie was stupid, his screen was engulfed by a Spitball, and his pump bladder galloped a musclebeast discotheque in his rib hollow for the fraction of a second it took before he noticed the letters weren't lurid mustard, but instead a teal colour. And arranged in an even more annoying way.

STUDENT #08413413: 4R3 YOU TH3 HYST3RIC4L R4G3K1D? MY B3ST3ST FR13ND S41D 1 SHOULD TROLL YOU AS R3V3NG3 FOR WH4T YOU D1D TO H3R, BUT 1 R34D WH4T YOU S41D 4ND YOU S33M PR3TTY FUNNY AND COOL TO M3 1 GU3SS!! SH3 1S R34LLY GR8 BUT DO3SNT H4V3 4 S3NS3 OF HUMOR WH3N SH3 KNOWS SH3 H4S B33N OUT-TROLL3D. >:[ MY N4M3 1S T3R3Z1 BY TH3 W4Y. WH4T 1S YOUR N4M3?

And that was another reason why he fondly remembered that particular Trauma Cautellery thinkfodder. Because he spent the rest of the session passing notes to Terezi. When he got angry, she didn't just snark back like Sollux or stay calm until he burned out the way Gamzee did; she happily shrieked along with him. But it wasn't in the way his crab did, with his symbiotic emotional responses, getting sucked into the vortex of his anger - it was in a detached way, like she was riding the trollercoaster of his rage, feeling the wind whistle at the base of her horns. He'd never had a friend like that before. It was pretty nice.

"So can you believe," Karkat mused, aloud. "Can you believe the obvious warning signs were staring me right in the face? Like how you typed the worst out of anyone I've ever seen with the exception of that helmetted Captor-looking bulgesmear, and how you liked that troll - oh, God, no, she was obviously Vriska, wasn't she? #88888888. I can't believe it took me sweeps to figure it out. Another day, another reason I'm a failure on every possible level. Fuck."

Looming over the back of his head, Karkat heard the snuffly, calcinated huff of Terezi preparing to speak.

"Karkat, what are you even talking about?"

"Nothing," Karkat said. "Just remembering Alternia. Hashmapping together some sick evidences that all point in the region of you being a gibbering maniac. You know. The usual stuff I think about that I always only realise long after the fact. _Espirit d_ 'fucking _tiered du vertiramp_."

Terezi chuckled.

"Did you just say 'hashmapping together some sick evidences?' It's cute when you try to talk like me and Dave at the same time." She made a critical sucking sound over her fangs. "You're really bad at it, though."

"I wasn't trying. The two of you are just contagious," Karkat snapped back, willing to cast doubt on his own status as a rage-fuelled euphuist to save visage platter.

"Also, 'tiered vertiramp'? That's not even a word in any Alternian language, obsolete or otherwise. It's not even a human word." Terezi gave her usual snigger, the slightly sniffly one that made him want to clear his wind pipe out of sympathy. "You made it up! Admit it!"

Karkat shifted in the chair. Kanaya had sewn a cover for it, alchemising the fabric using far more than necessary of the bright dragon scales from Terezi's collection. As a result, it was a kind of blistering neon green, blue and yellow paisley that Dave loved, Terezi greatly appreciated, and that Karkat suspected counted as an act of psychological warfare.

"Fine, I'll admit Dave tried to warn me about that, but I just thought it was in service to one of those bizarre memes the two of you bat around while retreating ever further into the cavernous depths of your own nooks."

"As if you and Gamzee don't spend all your paletime holding hands and talking in your crazy little way that is really hard to understand."

"Oh, come on. I wouldn't touch that whimsyfuck 's meat slabs if you paid me a million boonmints. I don't know where he's been."

"Coulraphobic slurs now? You are such a terrible friend! I'll tell him what you said."

Karkat alarm-slammed his hands onto his thighs. "Oh my God, please, don't tell him what I said."

Terezi let off a peal of giggles.

Karkat eventually slumped back into his seat, groaning in exasperation.

"Terezi," he said, hand on his face, over the sound of her laughter. "Terezi, I'm sorry. I can't risk you stirring up things. He's been pretty on edge, lately. No acrobatic motherfucking pirouettes off the handle yet, but maybe getting up there on tiptoe."

"Ah. Is that why - "

"Yes," Karkat admitted. "Yeah, he was flying into a mood and no matter how much I yelled at him it didn't seem to relax him."

"Wonder why?"

"But he wasn't in the mood for more huggy pacifying either, so I thought he needed some way to work off his violent streak. So, yeah. I challenged him to a rut."

Ignoring the faint hiccough of amusement in Terezi's breathing, Karkat immediately snarled - "Not that way, asshole."

"But only people with really long horns rut, and even then it's kind of strange," Terezi said, thoughtfully. "I've never wanted to do it myself. Especially not with a moirail."

Karkat thought immediately of the rutting scene in one of his favourite A Lowblood Male Wants To Woo A Highblood Female To Be His Kismesis And His Even-Lower-Blooded Moirail Attempts to Auspisticise Them Into A Stable Black Relationship Through The Dispensation Of Earthy Wisdom But It All Backfires When His Machinations Unexpectedly Cause The Female To Flush For Him, And Now They Have To Manage Unbalanced Quadrants And Their Unequal Power Dynamic As Well As Keep The Lowblood Male From Succumbing To His Unstable Psychic Powers And Killing Everybody movies, one of the oldest before everyone ripped off that plot. The rutting scene had been pretty much the most romantic thing he had ever seen, but only because it was done in context with them using the act to represent the red elements of their relationship being subsumed by pure, bittersweet caliginy. 

( _"Put your hands on my shoulders."_

_"To make out?"_

_"No. And then rest your horns… against mine, that's it."_

_"I can feel your powers throbbing behind your cranial plates, beating… in time. I want to be like this forever."_

_"No. We're not going to BE like this forever. Do you want to keep me safe out of pity? Or are you just scared… of what my powers make me capable of?"_

_"… **You** are **so** beauti **ful**."_ )

"Yeah, I know it's more of a blackrom thing in the movies," Karkat eventually protested, after stopping himself from repeating Jenser Sarrix's last line simply because he loved the way the weird stresses from her shitty acting made it almost stop being words, "but I thought it would be a good idea. Combining his need for gentle physical encouragement with his need for gratuitous physical violence. I don't need any advice on how to handle him. He's my moirail and I'll deal with him how I like.

"Actually, wait, hold the distance talkstring. This is just what I need! Unsolicited judgement from someone who's never held down a moirail of their own regarding a moiraillegience she knows nothing about! You know, with your help, no-one will need informed advice ever again. Let's just burn it all, pull down our righteously extended trousers and lawnring-aquifer our genetic material over the blaze until it extinguishes."

"But I am naturally judgemental, Karkat. What can I say? I've always been that way. I am _tough_. But fair."

"It's - " Karkat started, in distress, "It's all because the food on the meteor is all shitty junk food with no chitin. My nubby horns are practically crumbling to the touch, just like when you touch my head and my resolve about this crumbles."

"Well, I don't know," Terezi said, in a tone that sounded like she knew she did know, and wanted Karkat to know that. "My horns are magnificent! No shitty clown jousting is going to make them break." She hesitated, and then put her hand down on his head, against the scalp. Karkat shuddered. "Aren't you going to ask me what my secret is?"

"No. Believe it or not, I really don't care."

"Ask me."

"Still don't care, asshole."

"Do it!"

" _Kk-kk-kk-kk-kk-kk-kk_. Terezi, _kk-kk_ what is that obnoxious clicking sound? _Kk-kk-kk_ it's a Geiger counter measuring the radiation output as the few remaining giveafuck particles in my concern ganglion decay at a rate of trillions a millisecond."

"It's because of all the scrumptious chalk I eat. Maybe you should try some with me sometime."

Karkat caught the sound of her ironically flirtatious tone, the exact same one Dave used on him all the time, and felt his mulching sac contract into a neurotic knot of yearning; the feeling laced with delicate flickers of red and black, pale and ashen that he genuinely had no idea how to puzzle through. Future Karkat had told him once that he would get over feeling like this, but that was a long while ago, reminding him that Future Karkat was an absolute throbbing taintshit who had been lying to him and who didn't deserve to be developed into by the vaguely acceptable person that was himself. Not for the first time, Karkat found himself longing for actual time powers like Aradia's so he could travel to the future and punch Future Karkat in the wind pipe. 

And maybe hate-make out a little.

"Maybe I should also tell you to… fuck… the fuck off," he retorted, uninspiredly. His mental processes, including his verbalisation hemisphere, were preoccupied trying to determine where the hell that last thought had come from and bomb its home base.

"Hmm," said Terezi. "Or maybe we could get this over with. Doesn't that sound a lot easier than having endless stupid shitty arguments all the time?"

Karkat had to nod here, stopping with his mandibular jut resting against the top of his trunk cage, staring down at the hideous paisley in the V-shape between his legs and unable to avoid a sigh.

"Terezi, just so you know - "

"What is it, Karkat?"

"I only want you to carve away the damage, okay? Don't get creative. Having a blind artist carve my horns into tiny, nubby bone bulges is obviously my wildest dream, but I don't feel like achieving it right now."

 

 

The worst part about horns being mostly numb for most trolls was that, as Terezi began touching his horns, he had no real feedback for it. He could hear her, behind him, rather than feel her - the sound of her fingers rubbing against the growth rings reverberating through his skull, and the sound of her breathing. Every now and again, as if to check that he was paying attention, she would grip them tightly at the base at the bit he could just about feel, and one of the things he'd learned as a wiggler from playing championshit clown-wrestling on his lawnring with Gamzee (other than that, if he was going to suffer an explosive nosebleed from a badly executed chucklechokehold, to make sure that the only person watching him mutantspew everywhere was off his vestigial thoracic nozzle sacs on sopor and also severely concussed) was that when someone had you by the horns, you basically had no choice in where they were going to put your head. Maybe the humans had the right idea when it came to not growing the damn things.

"Hey," Terezi said suddenly, "how does _this_ feel?"

Karkat jolted out of his chair, tears pinkening his vision.

"Oh my god, what did you do?" he snapped at her, gasping for breath.

Terezi howled with laughter.

"Wish I knew how to get that reaction out of Dave without using my fangs," she said, in a tone of mock upset. Karkat's yearning stomach knot levelled up into a fully evolved digestive hanker gnarl, and a slightly phobic part of his general insanity started fretting about whether or not he would throw up everywhere, oh god. "All I did was put one of my claws into the crack." She craned her head so he could see her. "So did it hurt?"

"It felt like…" Karkat pondered, "like a thunderfly sting, only if instead of being made out of lightning it was made out of hot meat snakes. Only it also felt like the sound it makes when you put a wire fashion storage armature in your mouth and hit it really hard with something so that you lose your balance, fall forward and chip your front fangs on the husk edge, and speak with a whistle for months."

"Uh-huh," Terezi nodded, comprehending. Her head snaked back behind Karkat's. "Well, I guess I can smooth that off for you and fill in the crack, but a lot of your horn is going to have to come off!"

"Perfect! Obviously I have all the horn in the world to offcome," Karkat sniped, sulking. He was imagining how stupid he would look when Terezi scraped his horns completely away, and as he kneaded the image on the lightly grubfloured surface of his mind it gently doughed into imagining himself as a human, all hornless and round-toothed and with shell-pink fingernails. The image upset him in a totally non-racist way he couldn't explain.

"Don't worry, I'll do the other one too, so you'll be all balanced."

"I'm going to look completely fucking ridiculous, aren't I?" Karkat groaned, but then hesitated. "Look, okay, just - do what you think is best. You know more about this than I do for some stupid reason; I mean, you weren't paying any more attention in Trauma Cautellery schoolfeeding than I was, and we both know that. Just - "

"Yes?"

"If they end up super short, like, really short, could you cut my hair short so they look longer?"

Terezi screwed up her face.

" _Blaaaaaar_. Why can't you just stop being so insecure?"

 

Terezi marched back from the alchemiter, sylladexed her prizes into her outstretched hands, and Karkat immediately groaned. Clearly she'd been through literally everyone else's captcha hordes for the ingredients.

"Getting it to make these was super hard!" she said. "I am not so sure the alchemiter understands Alternian culture! You won't believe the absurdly expensive junk I have been making."

Standing in front of him, she thrust her arms forward, and he looked at the objects in her palms.

The first thing was an orange-and-yellow striped aerosol can with a label in Alternian. Probably a combination of that weird human 'shaving cream' thing and that one chainsaw Kanaya had.

"'HORN HUSTLER'," Karkat read aloud, "'BARBATROLL'. What the hell is this?"

"Don't you know what Barbatroll is?"

"I don't want anything so flammable-looking anywhere near my face."

"Aha," Terezi snorted, "that's where you'd be wrong. It's kind of flammable, but it's not so flammable. It's mostly just a really vicious acid."

"Well, that all sounds perfectly fucking okay, then. Let's have it near my face! Slather it in the stuff! Spray it on my face in creamy white rivulets, dribbling past my candy-flushing lips and gathering in my ecstasy-screaming yap gape."

"Let me finish! It makes the horn slightly easier to cut without having to use medical swords."

Considering our species is obviously superior to everything else in paradox space, Karkat thought, it really is depressing that we never developed a more practical alternative to chainsaws and two-handed broadswords when it came to sharpness-centric surgical procedures.

"Right, fine. I'd ask you what the other thing is but I can tell it's going to be even more of a disappointment."

"Shoosh, you! It's awesome! It's a Snoop Leijon Snow Cone-Sharpener."

Terezi wielded it at him, her grin widening. Reflexively, Karkat dodged, attempting to screw his body up into the corner between the seat and the chair back. It was shaped something like a human capital T letter, with a plastic lusus-lawnhive shape at the nexus, and three closely-stacked blades on the cap that reminded him of the claws of an old friend. Where had she got the code for that from? The last person to use those had been - 

Just as Karkat was about to ask her about when _exactly_ Gamzee had been talking to her because he had no idea they even liked each other, ever, she shifted behind him and wrapped her hand around the base of his horn, her cool tealblood fingers pushing in right where it was almost sensitive, and Karkat's mouth closed. With a tenderness that frankly alarmed him, her fingers stroked away the hair surrounding his horns, parting it and flattening it against his scalp.

"I'm going to trim away the broken horn now," she said, and he heard a sputtery whistle as something creamy sprayed from her Barbatroll can. Unable to look around, Karkat had to rely on his gut that the cold twinge in his scalp was the cream.

When the blade of the sharpener touched his horn, he immediately knew about it. The raucous, gravelly cacophony reverberated around his brainhole, and his vision buzzed like someone was trying to shove an oscillating onanistic simbulge down his nostril, allowing foul images of fountains of fudgey blood and snaggling chainsaws to flicker behind his eyes. Suddenly, he could feel his blood being pumped more rapidly - she could be doing anything at this point, and he would just have to shut his carb trap and deal with the consequences.

"Stop wiggling," Terezi complained.

"I'm not wiggling."

"You are," Terezi said, scraping. "There! You did it again! You don't even know you're doing it, do you?"

"Doing what?"

"Uuuugh! You're going to make me do it wrong!"

Karkat looked down at his feet. He realised that, for someone who was obviously sitting still, his knee was bouncing up and down rhythmically. He took his foot off the nerve and placed it flat on the floor, then calmly inserted a finger into his mouth to gnaw away at his nail, before realising there was nothing for his fangs to catch down on because he'd gnawed the protuberance bald in some other fit of frustration. Irritated, he sucked in his cheeks and gnawed on the soft flesh insides.

"Karkat!!"

"What?"

"That's what I'm talking about! You just keep flapping your head all over the place!"

"Why don't you j - "

"Shhhhhhhhhh," Terezi hissed, and he felt her spittle land in the nest of his hair. "Stop talking and then you won't be wiggling. Unless you want to have the only pair of horns in Paradox Space that are dumber than what you already have."

Karkat, with deliberation, sealed his lips tightly closed.

"Don't hold your breath, though," Terezi chirped, "that's just stupid."

Karkat inhaled.

Terezi sniggered.

Karkat said nothing.

"It's nice having you not talking for once," Terezi said. "I have to wonder if all Blood players are so insufferably talkative as you. I mean, you're a total windbag and half the time I don't think you even know what you're actually thinking but you feel you have to say something anyway, so you just invent ridiculous swear words and flap your head and wiggle. The only other Blood player I know is - "

Karkat opened his mouth and started making a faint, exasperated whine until Terezi brought her fist down neatly on the top of his head.

"F- _hnk_!"

"Close your mouth, dummy! Honestly, you're even worse than her."

Karkat was silent in a pointed, interrogative way.

"Uh, sorry to bring it back to her again," Terezi continued, voice catching with an emotion Karkat wasn't quite able to determine - something a little like regret, a little like frustration and a little like amusement. It was black and red and ashen and pale and platonic all at once and the romance of it made the chitinous fibres on the small of Karkat's back stand on end. "I was always doing this for her! Cleaning up her stupid horns when she got into scrapes. I don't think she ever rutted with anyone but she liked to tackle problems head-on, ha ha."

Confusingly, Karkat's bulge, remaining unmoving, gave a solitary throb as he imagined Terezi fondling the length of Vriska's slender horns.

"Well, when she wasn't cheating, anyway," Terezi said, "which was always. I mean, if you pretend that when I said 'tackle problems head-on', it wasn't a nauseatingly obvious attempt at framing a literal action as a metaphor for cheap and not very satisfying nonlaughs. She’d always pick stupid fights when roleplaying, for attention or to psych people out or just to prove how strong she was. Sometimes she'd let them hit her horns before she killed them. And they broke all the time, because they're weird horns for weirdos. Guess who had to learn how to patch up the damage."

 

 

Terezi moved onto his healthy horn, which bothered him, before rubbing something very cold into his broken one.

"This will just plug up all the cracks and leave them smooth and cute," she said. "I tried my very hardest! I hope you like them."

Karkat let his chute pinch slither down inside him, before it bounced back to the spot behind his edibles cave, where it swelled. His hand brushed upwards, past his hair. Terezi slapped it away.

"Have some trust, asshole!"

"When am I allowed to see how stupid I look?"

"Karkat, let me tell you that you do not look stupid."

"I see where this is going. You're going to say something like," Karkat retorted, then strained his squawk blister into a scratchy, helium replica of Terezi's perpetual shriek, "'YOU DON'T LOOK STUP1D TO M3EE33, B3C4US3 1 C4NT S33EE3' -EEEeeeeeehhhhk."

"What's the matter, Karkat?"

Karkat pulled himself back from his wheezing fit. 

"What the fuck is that smell?!"

"The sealer! If you hadn't sucked in so much air to yell just then, it wouldn't have bothered you," Terezi groaned, and Karkat identified something in her tone - showing through her usual blithe mania was something that sounded like genuine contempt. Karkat hated contempt. It was like hate that couldn't care less about proving anything. The sexy forms of hate involved really, really caring.

"Now, just sit still and wait for it to sink in. I'll be back. Don't touch them."

She paced forward, and Karkat felt his hand rise, just as she spun around on her heel, sliding her glasses down her nose with her left hand. Her dead eyes fixed his, and Karkat shivered.

"I will know."

"I wasn't even going to - " Karkat protested, but she was already going. He watched her angular, sinister body sashay away from him, and with a sigh he sunk back into the fetid bog of quadrant confusion where his mind had spent a whole sweep pickling. Perhaps it would be exhumed by archaeologists thousands of years into the future and held as an example of how primitive trollkind lived and genuinely deserved to die.

 

"Oh my god!!" Terezi shrieked, and Karkat lifted his head, shaking off the last of his fume-addled reverie. "Oh my gog! You smell completely adorable. Doesn't he, Dave?"

Karkat, noticing Dave tailing her, wished fervently that he could express his misery by projectile vomiting. It was such an easy and satisfying fantasy; opening his mouth and just spewing out a full double-pail orgasm of bile and chyme and shame. He wished he had two heads so he could shoot the vomit streams into each other, spraying the room and drenching everyone he hated, which was Terezi, Dave and mostly himself.

Dave smirked his infuriatingly pursed lips, or perhaps just attempted to dislodge a food flake from between his blunt human fangs with the corner of his mouth.

"You're right, he smells adorable. Man, yeah, I always thought he was pretty cute. In a wholly non-erotic way. Kind of in the way of a big-eyed, tousled puppy that spends all its time yapping total bullshit and generally being the king of all hilarious assholes."

"But the horns!! He looks like an actual person now. And so manly."

Karkat saw the crease of Dave's soft human forehead scrunch into what he could only guess was an eyewear-obscured squint.

"Yeah, I guess the horns are. Pointy?" Dave sighed. "Maybe I'm missing something. It's not even as extreme as an average haircut. I gotta admit, I don't get why this is a big deal. Unless that's the joke. That's the joke, right?"

"But horn shape is how you recognise people!"

"Yeah, I guess faces are outdated technology when instead you could be memorising the shapes of head-mounted keratin dicks. What civilisation wouldn't leap right over its own rad self to establish candy-corn skull phalluses as universal ID."

"A lame one too lazy to even have horns, as if being that lame makes any sense!" Terezi guffawed. 

"just how LAME do you even have to BE not to DO something like that............."

"Tonight..... I put SH4RP 3ND on this nub norh......."

The two of them derailed into mutual cachinnation, Terezi clawing at him with her tiny, bony hands. Karkat exhaled a long, whistling breath through his sniff prism and tried to look away.

"You don't understand how funny nubby-ended horns look to us, Dave!" Terezi said, and Karkat rolled his eyes. "No-one has nubby horns unless they've been filed down to hide blood colour, like if you're a slave or disgraced or disguising yourself or something. I used to think that was what Karkat was doing, kind of as a societal fuck-you, but for him they just grow like that, I guess. So weird!"

"Haha, maybe," said Dave, shrugging. "But you've gotta admit it's not even in the top hundred Most Reblogged Posts of the weirdest things about the dude."

"Yes, it really isn't," said Terezi, exaggeratedly downturning her mouth.

"Are the two of you finished yet?"

After giving a pointed glare to the sniggering couple, Karkat slithered out of the chair and set off towards Dave, trying to check his reflection in his shades. Dave, for some reason, seemed perturbed by the approach, or else was trying to act perturbed in order to humiliate Karkat in front of Terezi.

"Come on, Dave!" Karkat said, frustrated, "I'm just trying to check myself out. Look, I'm just going to gently place my hands on your cheeks, okay? And then carefully turn your head. Tender as a premium grubsteak. And platonic as fuck."

"Man," said Dave, from between Karkat's outstretched hands, "you do this kind of shit every time and it's like - I'm starting to think this isn't actually ironic and you're just deadly serious."

"Just shut up and let me - "

"No."

"Literally how hard would it be?"

"Haha. Okay. The dude trying to tenderly stroke me is asking me how hard it is."

"It isn't like that, you revolting grubthrobbing douchemammal, and you know it. Stop pretending otherwise."

"It's cool, it's cool. I don't blame you for wanting to rub your space hands all over this awesome D-Strider hotness. That's normal, ladies and dudes across paradox space are the exact same as you. It's just sad you have so many issues about your sexuality considering your species isn't even supposed to have them?"

"Strider, I swear to God - "

"No. Shhh. Regardless of how you feel about me you've gotta have faith your god ain't some small-minded bigot trying to make you feel like a piece of shit all the time for something he created you to feel in the first place. You're his child and he's got much clown love for you, and may the Juggalos find him mackin' on my cream baton alongside every being in creation of two whole universes as he raises his hand and welcomes you into the Eternal Living Room, where you can have your worshipful salvation amongst Strider's fine dime pan-universe bizzles."

Karkat opened his mouth to retort, but instead found himself emitting a rasping, unholy sound from somewhere in his despair cavity. Desperate for support, he looked over at Terezi, whose cackling raised to an intensity where she was no longer making any actual sounds at all. Then he looked back at Dave.

"First of all, what kind of a mixed metaphor clusterfuck was that? How could he raise his hands while handling a baton made of some kind of prepared ambrosia? How could you even hold an object made out of that stuff? See? Isn't it obvious when I put it like this how much smarter I am than you? Second of all, and by far not least, fuck every single inch, every milimeter, every fucking Earth human yoctometer square that makes up the cloud of loosely-affiliated hate stardust that composes your worthless body."

"Aw. You're making me blush."

"Crawl into a slime bladder and die. I'm off. I'm off to get pacified by my moirail before I am forced to escape the pain of knowing you exist by having Terezi bisect my think pan with a medical claymore in a horrifying cherry cough syrup tsunami."

He turned around smartly on his heel.

The last thing he heard before he metaphorically ollied outie was Terezi, speaking in a somewhat wistful voice.

"Sounds completely delicious."


End file.
